


Ex Machination

by viggorlijah



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-07
Updated: 2016-02-07
Packaged: 2018-05-18 21:18:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5943394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viggorlijah/pseuds/viggorlijah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So it turns out that The First Order makes a lot of their money from sex droids. And Kylo Ren designs them. This is mostly crack. And then it gets stranger.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ex Machination

 

Snap came back from a reconnaissance mission in a dinged-up shuttle borrowed from Maz. "Someone's going to have to pick up my X-Wing," he told Poe apologetically, "but it didn't feel right to fly them back as cargo."

"Cargo?" Poe asked and Snap ran his hand through his hair and sighed and went to the shuttle bay door.

"They're unarmed, I checked them myself, I mean I scanned them but maybe you should get C3P-O or someone here," he said, his voice fading to a muffle under other sounds of things moving inside the shuttle and Poe stepped back, his hand falling onto the blaster strapped to his side and his other hand thumbing open a comms channel automatically as some warning sensation, the same sense of danger that kept him alive in asteroid fields and dogfights, began to keen softly.

He wasn't expecting breasts. A lot of breasts. Snap was trying to tuck emergency blankets over shoulders and round tiny waists, but they kept sliding off as the – people? Humanoids except he didn't know if they were human, something that wasn't quite there and the twi'lek wasn't a twi'lek, and there was something strange about all of them as they stood in the shuttle door with Snap trying to squeeze past them without actually touching any of them and hurrying back over to Poe.

Poe hadn't taken his hand off his blaster yet. "Who are they, Snap?"

"Prisoners of the First Order, I think. Or made by the First Order. They were sold by the First Order to a contact of Maz and Chewie arranged for an accident, and we got the shipment. We thought they'd be weapons and then we opened the crate and they just started moving and looking up at us and I couldn't just close the box –"

"They're alive?"

Snap hesitated. "I think they're droids. But they don't speak droid. And one of them was broken in the accident, and it wasn't like the droids I've seen. Some of it looked organic."

"Okay. So the First Order is selling humanoid droids. And – oh fuck, Snap, they're sexbots?"

Snap, who Poe has walked in on having sex at least a dozen times, and vice-versa, drops his head and stares at the ground blushing bright red.

Sexbots. There's no way that's real. They're something out of bad holovids and sick fantasies. Droids find the very idea repugnant because sex is like eating and breathing, an inferior biological process. Why would anyone want to have sex with a droid?

Poe drags his gaze from the row of – women? Droids? Droids don't have genders, not unless they want them – to look hard at Snap. "You didn't. Snap, tell me you didn't."

"I didn't! Commander, I didn't, I swear. But they, uh. They tried. They don't talk droid or any of the languages I had on my translator but they seem to understand when you speak to them, and they all tried to get into my pants. And when they realized I wasn't going to, they spent the whole trip back fucking each other." Snap waves his hands in the air. "Thirty-seven hours, Poe! Thirty-seven hours to get back from Maz's place, with six sexbots in the back screwing each others brains out and, oh god, someone has to really scrub that shuttle out and disinfect it before we return it to her."

Snap has the eyes of a man who has seen things. Glorious and terrible things. And is about to crack. Poe has seen that look in the mirror enough times to recognize it.

He pats Snap's shoulder gently. "Two days standdown, debrief in a couple of hours. Go have a shower and send," he hesitates looking at the six figures standing, only now he can see that they're not standing but swaying gently or slinking against each other, hips cocked, hands trailing across their thighs, "a medteam, and Finn. Maybe he'll know something about dealing with them."

"They were called M-654s on the manifest," Snap offers as he walks away. "Maz put all the info on them from Chewie on the data on the nav chip."

 

 

* * *

 

 

The medteam is fascinated and can do nothing except some preliminary scans in the field. The droids won't step off the shuttle until someone holds their hand and then they sort of drape themselves over that person and start trying to kiss them and undress them, and the landing field becomes a blur of restraints and flushed faces and the medteam gives up and declares the shuttle a mobile clinic and starts setting up screens around it.

"We'll bring the scanners out here," Dr Kerellian says. Her hair is mussed and her medic coat is half unbuttoned, a white lace-trimmed slip peeping out. "We have no idea how to sedate them, and the restraints seem to trigger a different subroutine." Around them the medics are trying to undo the cuffs while the droid tries just as hard to keep them on.

Finn turned up with the General and stood with Poe to watch the chaos.

Leia had stayed for just five minutes before she gave the order that this side of the hanger be sealed off. "And get the footage contained if you can," she told her aide. "Although I'm sure it's already on their personal chips."

"Yes, General."

"Dameron, a report in two hours. And I want to know who made them."

He looks up from his datapad at that. "First Order, General. Chewbacca says they came from the Janos system originally which is one of their industrial bases."

"No," Leia says. "Who designed them. There's something familiar about them." She turned to her aide. "Get C3P-O back as soon as you can. He might have something on these."

"I know who designed them, General," Finn said. "They're M-models, right? They're M600 series I think."

"You knew the First Order had sexbots and didn't tell us?" Poe asked before he stop himself.

Finn's grip tightened on his cane. "It didn't come up in the debriefing. I thought you knew. I told them about the droid plants."

"We don't have droids like those in the Republic, Finn," Leia explained. "We didn't think they existed or at least not so – lifelike. Droids are not biological."

"They're all over the First Order. Mostly M600s. They're not good as Stormtroopers, but they do okay at maintenance. I worked with a couple of M500s on sanitation." Finn looked at the M-654s that had been persuaded now to settle down onto chairs, their faces tilted back as one medic stroked their faces while another took vitals. "Those are top of the line export models, the kind officers have."

"Are they sentient?"

"Yeah, I mean, I think so. I only worked with the M500s, but they learned things and they had ideas of their own."

"Why can't they talk?" Poe asked. "Or is it some First Order language?"

"They don't – he didn't give them language. I mean, it's deliberate. But I used to sign to them. We all did, on the sanitation teams if the officers didn't see. The M500s had their own hand signals and if they liked you, they'd teach you."

"Maybe they'll know the hand signs," Poe said, his mind racing to think of the other people on the base he knew with body-movement languages. They could communicate, there might be a network, a way to connect through the droids with C3P-O's spy network – he'd bet there was something to do with the biological parts that would make that harder, but Rey could help there – a new avenue for them to fight against the First Order.

"He didn't give them voices," Leia said quietly, and Poe's thoughts ground to a halt at the raw pain in her voice, the weight of recognition. He knew already what Finn would say and he wanted still to cover Finn's mouth, to silence his answer.

"No, General. Kylo Ren said they didn't need to be heard."

Leia stared at the M-654s. Poe followed her gaze and now, he could see what she saw too. The same delicate tilt to the nose, the same high curved cheekbones, the fall of dark hair where a medtech brushed it loose, while Leia's was shot through with grey and tightly bound above her head.

"Two hours, Dameron."

 

 

* * *

 

 

Finn fumbled through handsigns until one of them responded.

Fortunately it wasn't the Leia droid, because that's what Poe was calling them now in his head, now that he knew they'd been made by Kylo Ren, designed and made in thousands, Kylo's decision to shape the curve of a breast here or narrow a waist there, for this shade of skin or that freckle there – did he design every single one, or was he just signing his name to them? Finn can only remember thirty-odd designs but each one was well known, not hidden away but given a name and announced. "The twi'lek was a special model, and they had us give a big parade when she was manufactured. I never thought I'd get to see one up close," Finn said, his voice half-hushed in awe.

Finn kept trying with his hand signals and the M-654s watched him, like cats watching a mouse, their attention drifting almost entirely from the medtechs around them, to fix on Finn and his hands.

The M-654 Hucca model, a tiny barely past four feet tall model with a body that is all flat planes and almost-curves and a cap of sleek red curves, freckles falling across her like a constellation, made the first sign in response.

"They're hungry," Finn said. "They want protein and water. I used to give my M500s water rations, and sometimes they'd ask for a bite of protein."

Water was passed around and they drained a bottle each. Poe dug through his pockets for a protein bar which all of the M-654s took a tiny bite of and then returned to him half-nibbled.

Finn tries more hand signals but the Hucca put her hands over his, small pale fingers stilling his, and kissed the open palms of his hands then closed his hands, and Finn smiled at her, that same intense sweet smile that makes Poe miss a breath for the goodness in it, the recognition that this kindness, the First Order could not destroy in FN-2187.

"It's how we said goodnight, the M500s. I'd forgotten that. They did that at the end of shifts or when they were going off," he explained, coming back over to Poe.

"Do you think they understand what's happening?" Poe asked.

The M-654s were now stretched out on the chairs, letting the medtechs attach wires and cables, letting them tuck blankets over them. Some of them had turned slightly and their eyelids drifted down as if in sleep. Can droids sleep? Are they droids? How did no-one in the Republic know about them? Poe had less than an hour to answer these questions for the General, and the only plan he could think of was putting them back on the shuttle and sending the shuttle off into hyperspace, co-ordinates unknown.

Finn frowned. "I don't know. They don't feel the cold so they used to do a lot of the winter work, and we had one of the M500s get caught outside in a storm. I'd told her to fetch something and she just kept going until she froze. They don't care about staying alive. That's not what living things do, is it?"

Poe made sure not to look directly at Finn when he asked "And the M500s, they're not like, they don't have sex with people?"

Finn laughed. "No, they don't have the parts. They're all smooth underneath. I guess you could make them do something, but they don't want to. The M600s were different. "

The Leia-droid and the Hucca-droid were holding hands now, across the space between their chairs. They looked like lost children, wrapped up in blankets and surrounded by the medical machines. Fragile and small.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Except they weren't. Rey came back on the Millenium Falcon and spent a morning sitting in the middle of the circle of M-654s meditating and then walked out of the hanger with all of them following behind like little ducklings. They were wearing basic jumpsuits by then, thanks to patient dressing and handsigns from Finn, who had managed to get through a lot more silent grinding and groping than anyone else. Snap still refused to go back into the hanger and Jess had been pre-emptively forbidden for everyone's welfare.

Rey took them to an empty training field and Poe followed with BB-8 recording. She stopped and the M-654s lined up behind her, shoulders width apart. Rey began working through the fluid steps of her form. The M-654s followed her, and then Poe realized that they weren't following her a beat behind, but were moving at the same time, in sync with her. It was beautiful and fast and flawless.

She spun to face them and they shifted to make a circle around her and began to spar, one after another, Rey rising and kicking to meet each droid's lashing feet or slashing arm, a quick and hard fight that ended with the M-654 on the ground, and Rey moving to the next.

But when they were all done, Rey sank onto the ground and drew in a deep shuddering breath and then exhaled and it seemed to Poe as though the ground in the field also exhaled, the grass shivering and the rocks stirring and the M-654s rose up at the same time as Rey. Some of them were limping, one leaning on another, but they walked behind her as Rey went over to Poe.

"They were designed for training first, not sex. Tell General Leia that," she said.

"He made them for training?"

She nodded. She was sweating, flushed and bright-eyed. "They're very good. They've got something that's almost like force-sensitivity. It's not in them, but it amplifies with mine so they can sense me clearly and yet they can think independently. They're faster and stronger than a human opponent, and I don't have to worry about hurting them."

Poe looked over her shoulder at the M-654 that was leaning on the other, a leg clearly twisted to the side. The droid's face was placid and calm. "They don't have voices, Rey, but that doesn't mean they don't feel things."

Rey shook her head. "I can sense that. I mean – they do feel things. They don't like being hurt or losing, but they can turn it off, the pain, until it's fixed. I wouldn't hurt them on purpose," she said anxiously. "I'm not – I'm not – they like sparring. It's part of what they want to do. They were built to fight and fuck, and you won't let them fuck."

"Yeah, the fucking," Poe said. "That's a little. You notice the one that looks like the General?"

Turns out that Rey hadn't noticed the resemblance, and it's Poe that had to deal with the horrified choked-back retching that turned into laughing and weeping and back into dry heaving.

"What the hell are we going to do with them?" he asked her when she'd finished yelling at the sky about how fucked up Ben Solo is.

"I can take them back to the island for training."

"As Jedi?"

"No, I mean, to help me for training."

"Wouldn't that be weird for Luke? Like, hi, here's your nephew's sexbot of your sister who you made out with?" Poe said, because he was an idiot and exhausted.

"What? Master Luke – what?"

Poe only knew because his mom had the story secondhand from Han, and thought it was hilarious to tease Luke about when he'd still been Luke Skywalker setting up a Jedi Order and the New Republic was new, and Poe was small enough to hide under tables while the adults got drunk over cards and told stories.

Ben used to hide under the tale with him, he remembered. He was good with machines, even then, building and taking apart things. He worked on his dad's ship and he was allowed to repair the household droids. He'd wanted to be an engineer, not a Jedi.

When Rey stopped laughing, she asked seriously "Who owns them? Are they prisoners or cargo? The First Order makes them and sells them outside the Republic, but what are they inside the Republic?"

Poe stared up at the blue cloudless sky. He had no idea, and all of the droids C3P-O had contacted had about a billion ideas each, and the two lawyers drafted into the Resistance said it was basically a crapshoot either way.

"I think they're people," he said at last. "Finn was a number too, and he's people."

Rey's hand slipped into his and squeezed. "They're not like us," she agreed, "but they're people."

"What do they want?" he asked. "Do they want to go back to the First Order? Kylo Ren made them – do they want to go back to him?"

"I don't know," she said hesitantly. "I can feel him in them, not like he's there, but the shape of his mind. It's like walking into a room that someone's been in and knowing that they've been there by the way things are arranged. But they want to fight or to fuck. To fight and fuck. And each other. That's all they really want. I don't know if they want more than that."

"We can do fighting," Poe said. "I don't know if the General will allow the fucking, but we can do the fighting."

"I don't think they'll fight to kill," Rey said. "He built them to spar with, and they don't want to kill. They want to fight the same way they want to fuck."

Poe thought of the way they had moved with Rey in synchronicity, and then sparred in turn, adapting and rising and falling against her in a blur of limbs, of Rey's flushed sweaty face with her lip slightly split and a fresh bruise blossoming on one cheek, and groaned.

"I hate Kylo Ren so much," he told Rey fervently.

 

* * *

 

 

Busting up the selling was pretty pointless. The First Order had designed all the M600s and M500s to wear out within three years of manufacturing to increase their profits, and it was the manufacturing base that needed to be hit. The Janos system was just one of their industrial bases and all the profits carefully resdistributed to camouflage just how insanely profitable it was – when the analysts worked out what taking the system out would mean to the First Order, Admiral Ackbar had had to go and lie down for a while, muttering about resource allocation and budget overruns.

All Poe cared about was that it would cripple them. Extra bonus, now that they knew what to look for they would be able to detect similar facilities and bomb the hell out of them too in the future. No more sexbots for Kylo Ren and his cronies. Except for the ones they had for now.

And for those, maybe they could rescue them and rehabilitate them or something. Now they knew what to look for, instead of just passing them by as First Order people. They had faces to put to model numbers now and they'd already picked up some of them from Hutt brothels in the outer rim planets.

Finn knew a lot about them. They'd had posters, he'd explained, posters and presentations and sometimes if you were lucky, you got to see one up close if an officer took their M-model along with them. Captain Phasma had an M-model of her own, and he'd heard that sometimes Stormtroopers, if they did really well, they got rewarded, but that was rare. General Hux had three of them, and Kylo Ren had a whole room of them, but Finn hadn't seen those ones up close.

Poe had sat in on the first debriefing and then gotten the rest transcribed. It was the way Finn's voice dropped when he described them, reciting stats by memory, in a hushed awed voice. It wasn't painful exactly, but it felt filthy. Like listening to Kylo Ren's wet dreams and hearing them in Finn's voice.

The first six were housed in a purpose-built wing near the medtech bay. Close enough for monitoring and for people to have a reason to go by. Not that you needed a reason. There was a courtyard for fighting, and there were individual rooms for fucking. It was a little too much like a brothel for Poe who'd been around the outer rim enough to find them depressingly tragic instead of exotic, but Rey said the M-654s liked it.

They grew flowers in pots on their windowsills.

They had more handsignals and Finn taught BB-8 how to read the handsignals so Poe kept having to go by to pick up his own droid and he'd find people he knew entering or leaving the rooms. Finn would be in the courtyard, leaning against one of the trees there and talking or just watching one of the sparring matches.

Poe wanted to ask, but he also didn't want to ask.

They were leaving for Janos the next day, and Poe had gone over the mission plans repeatedly and checked his plane, checked the rest of the squads, checked in with the support teams and even forced himself to sit through caf with the commander of the cruiser that was unofficially loaned by the Anotallian system, an upright asshole who called the General her royal highness and bowed so low the feathers on his hat brushed the floor whenever she walked by. She did walk by several times while they were drinking caf though, and Poe thought the seventh time that made the commander dribble caf on his shiny shoes when he sprang up was definitely on purpose.

He needed to sleep. He also couldn't. He found himself wandering out to the medtech, and then beyond to the M-654s.

They had lanterns lit in the courtyard and two of them were sparring with long sticks, a quiet clack-clack that went in steady counterpoint to the gasps and moans from the rooms around them. Poe could see Finn sitting at the foot of the tree in the far corner, the familiar shape of his shoulders, and the curve of his smile bright in the lantern light when he saw Poe.

He sat down next to him, shoulder to shoulder and they watched the sparring. It was the Twi'lek and another model that Finn called Decca, with soft tightly curled hair that had grown wilder and longer to a dark halo around her head over the past month, a body of strong muscle and heavy build, powerful thighs and deep curves. Against her gleaming dark skin, the Twi'lek's pale blue was luminescent when they touched.

"They've been doing this for hours," Finn said. "Since sundown."

Poe started to say something, but the words got stuck in his mouth. They were jealous, petty words. You've been here that long? They look good, don't they? Do you want them? Do you want them more than you want anyone else?

He worried his lip and tried again. "You like hanging out here, huh."

He felt Finn's shrug. "I haven't got a lot else to do right now except recuperate and write debriefing memos. Here I get to feel useful. They don't understand a lot about this place, and I can help them."

"Oh," said Poe. "You're lonely." He wanted to take back the words as soon as he said them. He also wanted to punch himself in the head for all the times he'd told Finn he was busy because he thought he was being too obvious and Finn was being kind.

"Yeah," Finn said. "They're not. I don't think they know what lonely is. They know what it's like to not have something to do, though. They like doing things."

Poe watched as Jess Pava came out from one of the rooms, walking backwards, still kissing one of the M-654s, the Hucca with her legs wrapped around Pava's waist, then sliding off to be kissed once more, before pushing Pava away gently and waving goodbye to her.

"They like Jess," Finn said quietly. "She comes round a lot."

"They like you?" Poe asked. He kept his gaze on the Decca and the Twi'lek who had their sticks somehow twined together and were turning around the courtyard in slow steady steps.

"They think I'm strange," Finn said. "I'm a stormtrooper, but not a stormtrooper, and I don't want to fight them or fuck them, just talk."

"You don't –" Poe asked and swallowed, his throat dry. "You don't fuck them? I thought you were here all the time because they were –"

"I don't – Poe, I wouldn't fuck them. They're not, I mean, I'm not—"

"If you say you're not good enough, Finn, I swear I will find Hux and kill him myself—"

"No," Finn said putting his hand on Poe's arm and looking at him directly, steadily. "They're not who I want. I don't want a fuck. I want someone."

"Oh," said Poe stupidly and Finn was grinning but only briefly because then he was kissing Poe and Poe was kissing him back, and it was better, so much better than Poe had let himself dare think it would be.

They got tapped on the shoulders politely with sticks and told with hand-signals to go to their own damn rooms to fuck, and Poe looked up at Decca, her calm hard face and brilliant eyes and thought how twenty minutes ago he had hated and envied her, and now he loved the whole bunch of M-654s, and threw his arms around her and hugged her tightly. "Finn, how do you say thank you in handsigns?" he asked, muffled against her magnificent breasts.

"She thinks you want a threesome now," Finn said. "I'm saying no. Unless that's what you want?"

They had to run, leaving an indignant BB-8 locked outside Poe's door, but it was worth it because Finn, beautiful and laughing as his clothes came off and he sprawled under Poe on his bed was the memory that Poe took with him the next day on the bombing raid.

 

* * *

 

  
  
Money mattered a lot. The First Order began to struggle with funding. There were strategic retreats, unwise gambles to grab resources and Admiral Ackbar brought tiny darting green fish in little globes to the M-654s' courtyard, humming happily under his breath as he hung them up and showed them how to feed them pinches of dried mealworms and then ended up eating most of the mealworms himself.

Luke and Rey visited often and there was something terribly tender and awkward about the way Luke Skywalker treats the M-654s. Rey sparred with them and slept with Decca and Iocca, the one with the longest legs and quickest moves when she sparred who seemed to particularly like Rey, both of them tangling together, Iocca making that shivering movement that Poe had come to think of as the M600s' form of laughter.

But Luke Skywalker treated them all with reverence. He meditated in turn with each of them, went through the forms in practice with them, then sparred, and then took them each, one by one, to the rooms, to fuck.

"It's a Jedi thing," Rey said, shrugging when Poe turned to her incredulously.

"I thought they were monks!"

"Master Luke says that was almost definitely wrong because it didn't work. And it kept not working, so he's going to try the other way round. Lots and lots of attachments."

"You mean achieving one with the Force through sex?" Poe was aware that his voice had risen, and also that the General had picked that exact moment to come by looking for her brother.

"He's having sex with Iocca," Rey said. "He'll be done in about an hour or two. You want me to ask him to take a break?"

"Ah," said Leia. "No, that's fine. Poe, can you still breathe?"

"Not really," he choked.

"Good man," she said absently. "Rey, make sure he talks to me before he has sex with the one that looks like me when I was younger? It's a PR disaster waiting to happen."

"Yes, ma'am."

Eventually, Poe managed to ask sadly if everyone else has gone mad, and this was a pheromone-plot of Kylo Ren's, or if he had just fundamentally misunderstood the universe.

Luke Skywalker was dressed in a short robe and barefoot and feeding the fish while Rey and Iocca were in the room he'd just left having sex. Poe was pretty sure the bedsheets wouldn't have even been changed. He was aware that Rey had been sleeping on rocks and eating moss and smoked fish for a while, but clean sheets were Poe's thing when it comes to sex, and all he could think of is that Jedi were disgusting.

Finn liked clean sheets too. Finn liked tight corners on the bed and making everything orderly so they could mess it up with really good sex, then get clean and comfortable again. And Finn liked Poe.

Poe was pretty sure he'd sleep with Rey if she asked. She hasn't, although sometimes she looked at him and Finn speculatively, and he thought she would one of these days, but Poe didn't want to sleep with Rey the way he wanted to sleep with Finn. He wanted Finn like he wanted water and air. Rey was just really good chocolate.

He knew that's what Leia was like. He sat with her for the twelve days of mourning after Han Solo was declared dead, and he knew how his father had loved his mother. He knew that Rey and Jess and Snap and Luke and other people loved in other ways and he was just lucky to love someone who mostly loved him back the same way.

"You don't talk about Han Solo," he told Luke.

Luke put down the feeding pot and stared at the swimming fish. "I felt him die," he said. "I felt my sister's grief, and my nephew's sorrow. I had loved him from far away for so long that I seem to have developed the habit of loving him still."

"Wait, Kylo Ren was sorry?"

Mildly annoyed, Luke said, "I am baring my emotions here, Poe Dameron. But yes, Ben was filled with sorrow."

"He can feel things?"

Luke looked puzzled. "Or course he can. Snoke has him balanced between the dark and light to make him more powerful."

"So that whole 'there is light in him' isn't just the General trying to get us not to kill him?"

Luke laughed softly. "No, she'd shoot him herself if she thought it would win the war."

Poe stared up at Luke's fondly smiling face. "You're all crazy, aren't you? Is it the Jedi or is this just a Skywalker thing?"

"Jedi, I think," Luke said. "Snoke used to be a Jedi, a few centuries ago, and all the old temple records I've found make for some strange reading. The Sith empire used to hold month-long orgies that ended with them burning all the slaves alive and feasting on their bodies. Then they'd use the bones as nutrition for magnificent force-sensitive flowers that bloomed around their temples. The illustrations are quite beautiful."

"Of the flowers or the slave burning?" Poe asked.

"The flowers," Luke said. "We don't burn slaves now. Instead, my nephew has decided to build them."

Poe wanted to ask more questions but Rey came out naked with Iocca and started bathing with a washcloth and Luke went over to help when Rey's hair got tangled, and it became way too confusing for Poe so he went to find Finn and have uncomplicated straightforward blowjobs in a supply closet.

"I really, really hate Kylo Ren," he muttered afterwards when Finn was adjusting his clothes and trying to find his datapad among the knocked over files.

 

 

* * *

 

 

He didn't though, not truly, until the three months later when Hucca woke one morning and left the base and walked into a field, under a tree and curled up and died. It was death, as far as the medtechs could determine, for what the M-654s were alive. They kept her in a bacta tank and then they tried different ways to get around her power banks but nothing worked.

Her skin began to peel off, and her hair, the short sleek red hair that had grown into wavy red curls, fell out. Her eyelashes fell out too, and when they opened her mouth gently, teeth began to slide from her gums.

"Autopsy," Leia said. "Then wrap her body as best you can and we will bury her if that's what the other M-654s want."

Finn had brought them one by one to the tree to see her, and they had all bent to touch her small still body, and then turned and walked quickly back to their rooms. "They say feed her, feed her, feed her," he told Poe. "They keep saying that she's hungry or tired and that she needs food or energy. Then when I try to explain to them, they say they won't talk."

"Can't or won't?" Poe asked.

Finn flexed his fingers and looked at them, frowning as he considered the question. "Won't," he decided. "They know she's dead. But they don't like her being dead."

Most of the base it seems came to the funeral. Hucca was washed and wrapped, a round softness of white cloth nestled in the dry wood and crackling leaves piled up in a pyre by the lakeside. They put down candles to float, an Alderaan custom that the General brought to the Resistance, and the M-654s lit the pyre with Rey's help.

They wore white too and stood behind Rey, close to the fire, and Poe wondered how long it would be before there were five more pyres for them.

They couldn't make sounds when they cried, but they could weep.

He really hated Kylo Ren then.

 

* * *

 

 

 

It takes seventeen months. The twi'lek is the last, a few weeks after Iocca, and she spent those weeks following someone around. There was always someone, an unofficial roster of people handing Twi from one to the other, smoothing down across her skin, bringing her tiny sips of cold water or taking her from one room to another. They had closed the M-654 courtyard when Iocca died, and brought Twi back to the base, back to go from warm bed to warm bed, until she could sleep, clinging to whoever's turn it was to hold her.

"She's getting slower," Doctor Kerellian reported at the morning meeting. "Her heartrate and respiration are following the same pattern as the others. She has different physiology, but we'd estimate 4.5 days, possibly 5."

Poe looked at his datapad. They'd started the meeting with good news. The First Order had lost control of another planet in a skirmish with the Irrations coalition, and the New Republic had approved senate elections for the first time since the Hosnian genocide.

Huge news. Great news. The sexbots were wearing out, and that had been the plan, because they were all going to die anyway, and the twi'lek was only the last one. She would have reached her expiration date in some First Order battleship or an outer rim brothel anyway. At least her she had a room and friends and, fuck they never gave her a proper name. They just called her Twi.

"Permission to go fuck Kylo Ren over, General?" he found himself asking, interrupting a summary of their supply run plans.

Leia looked at him and sighed. "You've got four days leave, Poe."

 

* * *

 

 

They knew where Kylo Ren was now. They knew where Snoke was. They couldn't do much about that because it was basically a Sith deathtrap inside a First Order deathtrap inside an asteroid minefield.

Poe thought about flying there and staging a daring one-man attack in an X-Wing, something totally unexpected and brave. Then he remembered that unlike most of the complete lunatics he worked with, he was sane and decided to go ask for help.

That was how he found himself backed up against the bar in Maz's castle with a hand at his throat and Kylo Ren grinding his knee painfully into Poe's crotch about two days later.

In future, he thought, as he stared into Kylo Ren – Ben, he told himself, Ben's eyes, pupils blown so wide they were all black, and felt himself respond despite, who was he kidding, because of the pain, to the crush of Ben's body against his, when he asked Maz to help him find someone, he would be a little more detailed so she didn't just turn and shout at the bar "Anyone here know where Kylo Ren is? I've got a Poe Dameron wants to hook up."

"You blew up my factory," Ben said. He wasn't wearing the mask this time and the scar Rey gave him was annoyingly attractive.

"You made a sexbot of your mom, Ben," Poe wheezed over Ben's hand around his throat.

"It's a training robot, for –" Ben let go so he could thump the wall over Poe's head. "A training robot. It was Hux's idea to make them want sex so he could sell them on the secondary market. And that model's not available outside the First Order."

"We had one," Poe said. "And it was definitely a sexbot. Like, half the Resistance slept with it. And your uncle." He paused. "I think your mom slept with it too."

Ben's horrified face now was almost worth the bruises around Poe's neck and developing rapidly across his thighs. Also, his likely imminent death.

"I'm going to kill Hux," Ben said shortly. "And Snoke. He promised the Leia model was only for the Finalizer."

He looked down at Poe, and this was the face that Poe still woke up to from nightmares, Finn the steady calm arms that wrapped around him and pulled him ashore, away from the pale jagged rocks of Kylo Ren's mind searching his. Only now, there was Ben's face in there, Leia's eyes and Han's nose, the mouth that turned slightly at the corner when he spoke as if he was about to smile, as if he might. "Did you fuck her?" he asked.

"No," Poe said. "I'm fucking Finn."

"FN-2187."

"Finn," Poe said tiredly. "They have names, Ben. These people you've made. You gave them numbers and you take away their lives and their names."

"They're not people," Ben said and he pushed Poe back up against the wall, pinned both his wrists easily up with one hand and with the other, began to undo Poe's belt. "I can sense people. I can feel them in the Force. These sexbots, they're just mirrors, catching little bits of light from other people, enough to dazzle you into thinking they're real."

"Am I real?" Poe asked as Ben pulled down his pants, his hand warm and firm on Poe's bared skin. The sideroom they were in was damp and drafty, and Ben was so warm and solid, and when he kissed Poe, it was like colour and light returning to the world, as if Poe had been frozen ever since the interrogation room and now Ben was making him live.

"You burn bright enough," Ben said and he licked his palm and lifted Poe against him, holding him trapped between the burning cold of the castle walls and the heartbeat warmth of Ben's body and began to thrust, and Poe put his arms around Ben's neck and thought of Twi'lek and Finn wrapped together in a blanket and waiting for him in his neatly made bed on D'Qar, of all the love that Leia carried as a shroud with her, the wildflower sweetness of Rey's love scattered far and wide, and he clung closer to Ben and whispered in his ear, "Let them live longer, let them live longer," until Ben growled angrily and kissed him hard into silence as he came.

"There's a bed," Poe pointed out afterwards.

Ben kicked it with his foot and a cloud of dust lifted briefly. "Disgusting. Clean sheets for sex or sex against a wall."

"Are you going to kill me now?" Poe was trying to decide if he should put his jacket back on or not. Finn had a real thing for the jacket, and he wasn't sure it could take another lightsaber accident.

He heard the lightsaber activate. Then there was no sound and when he turned around, the sideroom was empty. The bed had been cut neatly in two though.

Maz made him take a bill for the bed back to the Resistance. "The First Order certainly won't pay for it."

 

* * *

 

 

 

Twi died two days later, and Poe told Finn about Ben when they were walking back from the funeral.

"Oh," was all Finn said. His hand slipped out from Poe's and he walked away without looking back.

Poe thought about sleeping in the courtyard at the M-654s, but a lot of other people had had the same idea, and it was full of people talking quietly, crying softly and in some corners, making out. Add a fight, and it would've been exactly what they wanted, he supposed.

He ended up in the X-Wings hanger, sleeping on the couch near the comms desk. Jess found him and gave him a mug of caf.

"I saw Finn."

"I fucked up," Poe said quickly. "Not Finn."

"I figured," Jess said. "I got him breakfast muffins and caf."

The weirdest part was that nothing much changed. The General didn't say anything so maybe she didn't really have the force sensitivity he'd always secretly feared she did to read minds. He was busy with patrols and planning attacks now that they'd got the First Order in the last stages of retreat. Finn was busy with his own work, and it turned out that their lives didn't overlap if they didn't want them too.

He flies his plane, he kills bad guys, he drinks with the other pilots, he goes to sleep. Wash and repeat.

Then the General collapsed during a meeting and there was an emergency transmission from Ahch-To, and it was Rey, grey-faced and barely breathing whispering into the comms about the coming darkness, before the transmission broke into static.

He's grounded for the entire op which was a special kind of hell, but there was no choice as he was the only senior strategist who'd worked on this crisis plan with Leia who was still out cold in the medtech. They scrambled to get aircover and then surveillance as far out as they could. There were beacons all the way to Ahch-To on the jumppoints, and Poe watched with mounting dread as each beacon went bright burning red and then dead.

He didn't let himself think about Ahch-To. There's nothing they could do there, and there's nothing they could do here except brace for impact.

When it came, it was the Finaliser. The ship entered atmosphere and then hung silent and still above their base. There was something wrong with the ship, and it's Finn who pointed it out first. "Where are the laser cannons?"

They were gone, sheared off neatly and completely.

There were other things missing, the scans confirmed. Tracking and scanning was intact, shields were up, but offensive weaponry was removed.

"We're being hailed, Commander."

"Put it on," he heard behind him and turned in relief. The General was leaning heavily on Doctor Korellian who scowled at anyone who stood too close to them, and she sank into a chair with a sigh of relief. "Someone get Ahch-To back online in another room as well."

He's about to explain about the beacons when the Finalizer's transmission comes through, the screen filling up with the bridge and in the middle, Ben. He's not masked and he's wearing a greatcoat that looks familiar, if bloodstained.

"Hello, mother," he says.

"Ben."

They stare at each other for a while and Poe wonders if anyone else in the room is as uncomfortable as he is. Probably everyone, he decides.

"Snoke is dead. Hux is dead."

"I know."

"I wanted to – " Ben sighed and Poe tightened his grip on the table until his hands ached, his knuckles white and his fingernails gouging the wood. "I wanted to build them, and you wouldn't let me."

"Build what, Ben?" she asked, and Poe thought he was prepared, but he wasn't. They came out from the side off-screen and over to Ben, all of them looking like children blurring into adolescents, but still recognizable. There was Leia, and Han, Luke, and faces that Poe recognized from old books, Padme and Anakin, Obi-Wan and then, stepping shyly in front of the camera, curls and dark eyes, the curved cheeks he'd hated when he was little, Poe. There's a Rey, stepping up to the camera, a boy who looks like Hucca, a girl who's tall and blond, and they all crowded around Ben, and stared up at him and then quickly back at the camera as he bent and whispered to them, touched their faces, their cheeks, patted their shoulders.

"I had to make them age," he said. "When you destroyed my factories, I had to find another way to make them. Snoke didn't think it was possible, but I only had to let them live longer. And then I didn't need Snoke any more, mother."

Poe thought he might break this table too. He could feel blood seeping under his fingernails.

"Ben?" Leia said and Poe looked at her through eyes blurring with tears. "Ben, I need you to know that I have always loved you. And I always will love you."

Ben stepped closer to the screen. The boy that looked like Poe, that could be Poe from a DNA sample he guessed, grown and manipulated however Ben's managed to create life, the boy that isn't a clone or a droid but something new, stretched sleepy arms around Ben's neck and Ben held him close, stroking his hair affectionately. "I can make you a new Ben," he told her.

"No," Leia said. "I loved my Ben." She took the datapad from her lap and pressed her palm against the security seal and said crisply "Admiral Ackbar, engage code 792."

The codes were preset and the overrides simple. Ackbar was fast.

The Finalizer broke into four parts, obliterating a good third of the base as it fell, and setting fire to a forest in the west.

They lost sixteen people on the base. There were no on-board survivors.

 

* * *

 

 

 

"I think I fucked up," Poe told Rey. They were out in one of the scorched fields, watching the grass grow back or some Jedi bullshit. Mostly, avoiding the work waiting for them back at the base, and in Poe's case, avoiding Finn.

The end of a war meant a lot of paperwork. Leia was going to Ahch-To with Luke which meant installing plumbing and real interspace communication and daily fights mediated by Chewie, and D'Qar was going to turn into a training camp or memorial, and Poe was probably going to go back to the Republic's squadron. Or be a smuggler.

Finn was going to do something awesome with Leia involving paperwork. Apparently Finn could do things with human resource systems that made bureaucrats weep for joy. Also sanitation, so Rey wanted him at Ahch-To.

"You mean how you found your one true love then cheated on him with a crazy psycho?" Rey asked. She was trying to do a one-hand handstand into no-hands and landed in a sprawl near where he was sitting, brooding.

"Yeah," Poe said. "That."

"Hey, I'm just glad I found out that I'm not related to Luke or Leia before I slept with them, so I'm really not the person for thoughtful relationship advice."

Poe squinted at her. "You're sleeping with both of them?"

"Yup. Attachments. And Jess. And Snap. And sometimes I sleep with Finn, except that's just sleeping because he doesn't like being in bed alone." She sat down against him. "Look, if it were me, I'd just sleep with him again. Except it's not about sex is it?"

She took his hand and spread it open and touched the fading scabs and scars where he tore his fingernails half off the day the Finalizer died. The day Ben died. She turned his hands over and lightly brushed the backs of his knuckles where they'd almost completely healed from splitting open.

"I could feel so much grief that day, and yours was a different song to theirs," she said. "Why were you so sad when he died?"

"They all died," he said. "All of them. Not just the droids he'd made, but the droids he could have made. And I knew what that was like, to be something he made," Poe said softly. "You know Rey, you and I, we're the only two people who ever lived past one of his interrogations?"

She shook her head. "I didn't know that."

"Finn saved me. You saved yourself." Poe looked at his hands and thought about being back in that chair, the chair that had blown apart, become just another piece of twisted scrap flung somewhere in the explosion to land and be forgotten on D'Qar. "He didn't mean for me to live, and so he made me into something when I was in that chair. He made me want to tell him everything. He made me want. I wanted and wanted, and all I wanted was him because I knew who he was."

"It wasn't real," she said quietly.

Poe shrugged. "It felt real. I love Finn, but Finn's never been inside my brain making me want him."

"And now he's gone? Do you still want him?"

Poe pulled his hands away from Rey and slid them into his pockets. "More than ever," he said. "He's gone and I ache for him like the sun is gone. Finn feels like the moon."

He could hear her calling his name as he walked away, but he didn't slow down or look back. Some part of him felt lighter and easier for telling her the truth, and he was grateful for that. The rest of him felt the same – burned up in orbit, ashes on the wind, and a nameless, roiling want.

He was a droid, without a master, running slowly out of power.

 

* * *

 

 

Luke Skywalker took him to Ahch-To in a modified X-Wing. It was a two-seater and the flight was a complicated series of hops without BB-8 along to assist. Poe managed to keep conversation to a minimum and Luke was a very good pilot that made the flight a pleasure.

They didn't land on the main island though, but a little further off, near one of those tangled stairways that lead to cottages. Poe climbed down, suspicious.

He'd been fine, rejoining the Rapier Squadron and serving as tactical liason for the Jedi Academy. He managed three polite conversations with Finn, and he went out every three days he was grounded and found someone willing for sex. He kept a log and everything was going fine.

"We found a Hucca," Luke said and grabbed a bag from the X-Wing and started climbing up the staircase. "Still operational."

Poe caught up. "What do you mean, operational? Weeks, days?"

Luke shrugged. "Maybe years. This was a special model. We think the General or Ben had it modified. Or the original model. Without the three year restriction."

The cottage at the top had curtains in every window. There was smoke curling from one of the chimneys and in the front, in neat rows, were ridges of shells protecting seedlings from the ocean winds. Poe stepped inside after Luke, and found he had to grab the back of one of the chairs, his legs gone suddenly weak with relief.

Hucca. Her hair in a plait that curved to one side, dishing stew into three bowls, and when she looked up and saw him staring at her, the same considering tilt to her head and the same pale red eyebrows, the almost invisible lashes, and yet – "She's taller," he said. "She's too tall for a Hucca."

"I'm the original Hux height," she answered. "He made me smaller for the others."

Her smile was tight and satisfied, when Poe sat down stunned at the table and took the bowl of stew she placed in front of him and began to eat. It was good, and Luke finished his and asked for more. Hucca ate only some of hers, and Poe wondered if she ate any or if this was faux-programming to blend in socially.

Then he wondered if she had spoken or if he was going crazy again.

"She spoke, right?" he asked Luke.

"I did," she said and took his empty bowl back to the kitchen sink.

Luke licked his spoon. "He gave her a voice, but Hux had them removed. Or Ben. She's not sure who decided for the production models."

"It could have been Snoke," she said, coming back with a pot of tea and mugs, whisking away the other dishes. There was a towel over one shoulder and Poe wondered if he should offer to help or stay at the table. "He was always making suggestions to Ben."

She sat down and poured the tea out and looked at Poe from behind her mug. He had met Hux once, in passing at a pitched ground retreat, and Hucca looked like his twin sister. He wondered if she was meant as a compliment or an insult.

"I know he's dead," she said, sipping her tea. "Ben, I mean."

"Do you," he hesitated and chose his words carefully, "did he make you miss him?"

She smiled. "Yes."

Poe took a long drink of tea. It was bitter and strong and filled him with unexpected warmth. "I miss him too," he confessed.

Luke left shortly afterwards. "I need to see Leia. I'll be back tomorrow around dinner time, and there's a comms unit somewhere in there," he said waving vaguely at the back of the cottage. "A bed too. Poe, she's probably the only other creature in the universe that misses Ben the way you do and misery loves company."

Poe watched Luke scale down the twisty staircase in the dark and wondered how the Jedi got to be so amazingly advanced and annoying simultaneously. All that meditating. He waited until he heard the X-Wing take off and then went back into the warmth of the cottage.

"Hucca," he called softly and she came out from the kitchen, unpinning her apron. "Are you like the others? Do you want more than them or –"

"I want what I want," she said with a hard shrug that he remembered from a shorter narrower woman long ago, one with a tight shining cap of bright copper hair, not this thick braid of deep firey red that came apart in his hands and fell down over her bare back as she slipped off her dress and was naked in front of him.

"Tell me about Ben," he asked, "if you want. Tell me, please."

Her body was warm and her voice sounded, he realized in the morning familiar because it was – it was General Hux's voice in a lighter timbre, familiar from all the propaganda materials Poe had heard before – but she tells him about Ben training, Ben fighting and building his lightsaber, about waiting in meeting rooms and side rooms and bedrooms, about being passed by Ben to General Hux who stripped her naked and then beat her with a switch until she was striped with blood and sent her back to him. "I don't scar," she says and turns to show him where she's been cut open by Ben, by the General, once lying between them both, still holding them within her only to feel the knife against her throat, the shallow cuts against her breasts. "He wished I would scar, or brand, but Ben would heal whatever was damaged and send me back perfectly formed again to be broken."

Poe lapped at her thighs then, her ankles crossed behind his head, her voice a sigh in the dim lit room. He breathed on the warm center of her, slid his fingers in and crooked and curled until she moved against him, murmuring "again, more," and he went in with his mouth and his tongue while she spilled his name and Ben's together and told him how she had been taken once to stand near the General and Ben during negotiations, dressed in pure white that was spattered in red and gore when they slaughtered everyone in the room at the end of the negotiations as planned.

"There was a table in the middle of the room and Ben pushed the wounded and dying off it, and the General put me on it and they tore open my dress and climbed over me and took me there. It was the first time for the General, with Ben. He couldn't wait and there was Ben on the table and they were on each other clawing at their clothes and fucking, and I went under the table. A woman under the table was bleeding out from a chest wound and she thought I was there to help her. The table kept shaking each time the General fucked Ben, and I held her hand and she crawled into my lap, because she was so afraid of them."

He came up over her then and Hucca touched his face and wrapped her arms around him and pulled him into her. He whispered "Were you afraid of them?" as they began to rock back and forth.

"I learned to be," she said. "Again, more. I learned how to be afraid and sad and angry. There, oh deeper, more, Poe, more," and she turned him with the strength that was metal beneath skin and the power of her desire and held him to the bed and rode against him. He wanted to come, wanted to pant out his own release as she was, but everytime he came near, loss swallowed his desire and cast him away.

"I can't," he said at last. "I can't do this with you. With anyone real."

"I'm real," Hucca said and pinned his wrists above his head. "Was it pain? Or was it pleasure he used?"

"Pain," Poe managed to grit out. "It felt like pleasure, but it was pain." She shifted her hands and his wristbones ground together and his cock stiffened inside of her and there it was, the edges of desire again.

"He made us, and he left us," she said as she rode him, sinking backwards so that his shoulders were wrenched at an awful angle, aching like they might pop out at any moment, but none of that mattered because she was sliding against him and on him and he could barely thrust against the heat of her. The bite she made with sharp even teeth at his ear and his neck, the twist of his arms and the burn of his legs as he knelt before her and pushed up as hard as he could manage against her iron restraint, all that was nothing to the need to fuck her, the desperation to be closer to touch her as she gave him warmth and pleasure against cold pain.

"He left us, and we'll live," she said and let go of his wrists and sank down onto him in one moment so his arms wrapped around her back, and caught her against him, soft breasts and flooding heat to thrust into, from bound pain to a warm embrace. He came and it was like falling backwards and apart.

He stumbled out of the bed on shaking legs and made it to the cottage door to vomit. Hucca brought him a bowl and a cloth to wash with, then went back to her bed and brought him a blanket.

"Thank you," he said, catching her hand as she turned to return to her bed.

"For what?" she asked. "He's dead and we're not."

He had meant for the food, for the sex, or the night, the blanket and the kindness. The truths she'd shared. Except now, he understood there was nothing to be thankful for, and so he nodded instead and let go of her hand.

 

* * *

 

It takes six years. Then there's a morning when Poe wakes up and the first thing he thinks of isn't ' _Ben Solo is dead and I'm alive_ '. It's fourth, or fifth, and then he has to spend a while thinking about how it's not the first.

He visited Hucca often, and then sometimes. Once, when he landed there, the cottage was empty and he thought he must have imagined her except for a broken seashell by the door. Luke turned up after a couple of hours of Poe weeping silently in the empty cottage to tell him it was only temporary, and when he came back in a week, Hucca was in her cottage and she had a cat named Millicent that glared at Poe and slept at the foot of Hucca's bed, resenting with claws any visitors there.

He got hit on a rescue mission – Rey didn't mean to become a pirate queen, but these things apparently happen to Jedi all the time, Luke tells him – and when he was falling down into the freezing cold waters, hoping his parachute and emergency suit deployed in time, he thought ' _I wish I'd been able to see Finn again_ '.

When he woke up at the medtech, he did. Finn was asleep in the chair next to his bed, wearing the jacket Poe had given him. Rey was snoring on the couch nearby and still wearing her pirate queen crown, and BB-8 was plugged in, charging. Finn looked – he wanted to see if Finn looked the same, and when he moved, that was enough that Finn woke up and they were looking at each other again across a hospital bed.

Poe didn't remember those tiny crinkles at the corner of Finn's eyes, and Finn's hair looked longer, but there was no time to take in any of those details because Finn was kissing him and this, Poe remembered. This Poe remembered and wanted. Like air, like water. Finn.

 


End file.
